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During the COVID-19 pandemic, universities and colleges across the United States were forced to shift rapidly from in-person education to “emergency remote learning” with little time to redesign courses and programs appropriately. The shift presented substantial problems for academic services and support units, not to mention for the students themselves.
In an opinion piece for Frontiers in Public Health, CUNY SPH faculty Sergio Costa, Ilias Kavouras, Nevin Cohen, and Terry Huang use the lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic to propose three ways schools and programs can build multimodal organizations and improve the online learning experience.
The authors say faculty must be trained in the method and practice of online teaching as well as the technology that enables online learning. For many instructors, the abrupt shift to remote teaching proved highly disruptive and stressful, forcing many to do the best they could in a very difficult situation. Institutions should rethink and invest in online education, training, and other educational innovations. This will require coordination and commitment of senior leadership within learning institutions everywhere and willingness on the part of faculty to evolve as educators, they say.
Schools should regularly survey students to discover who needs equipment, services, and materials and follow up with an action plan to address these needs, the authors note.
Lastly, to keep pace with institutions that have successfully implemented online learning, schools and programs should create flexible and modular options among their academic offerings.
Together, these strategies will help programs and schools keep pace with peer institutions with well-developed online programs, the authors say.
“The pandemic disrupted everything,” Dr. Costa says. “We offer a perspective to help schools and programs grow by preparing faculty, supporting students, and reimagining educational offerings using multiple modalities of educational delivery. Building multimodal organizations is no longer about the future; it is about the present.”
